A Day of Small Victories – Glasgow 2014

Monday was a day of small victories. Firstly, I made my way from the Village to the Tollcross swimming pool, straight, no wrong turns, no doubling back, like a hot knife through butter, and then, from there, I made it straight to the SECC without any bumps in the road either. After the nightmares I endured last week in attempting to get to both of those places on the same day, it was a huge relief to know that I am still capable of learning from my mistakes! It took such an effort not to express my relief to my passengers on arrival at both venues; but it was a private victory, so I just drove to the drop off point and let them out of the car, pretending that this was a perfectly every day sort of happening.

My second victory was to secure lunch at the SECC. As my base is at the Athletes Village, that is also the place where I can have a meal as a matter of course by simply picking up a voucher from our dedicated check-in desk . Those of you who have been following my Games adventure will know that I have rarely been at the Village at meal times, and have, on some days endured an enforced period of fasting.

As a ‘roaming CGA assistant’ I should be able to get a meal at any venue, but first I have to get a meal ticket there, as for some mysterious reason, the tickets from one place cannot be used at another, and the ticket regime is an absolute. I had an hour or so between drop off and pick up at the SECC so I made food my one mission.

The car was in the car park that everyone calls the Cheese Grater at one end of the SECC site, and the Workforce check-in is in a downstairs area of the Crowne Plaza hotel at the other end. It was the sort of ‘go up there, left there, then right and down the stairs at the bottom and then through there and it’s round the corner at the end’ journey, but I was determined not to be defeated. Having secured the voucher, it was then back, halfway to where I had started, to the Workforce Dining to collect a brown bag, a sandwich and a tub of ice cream. By the time I got back to the car, the whole process had taken me half an hour. In celebration, I sat on the tail gate of the car and ate.

And finally the biggest victory of the day – the Mozambique team won a medal! Silver for Maria Muchavo in the women’s T12 100m. I caught the final on television, and for the first time of this Games found myself rooting for a competitor, and actually punched the air when she came across the line in second place. The BBC coverage was entirely biased towards the English runner Libby Clegg, so one might have thought she was the only one in the race, or receiving a medal, but occasionally on the edge of the shot I could see ‘our girl’.

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